sorry i'm late to the party! i've been excited to see your take on bl, meg. i'm not disappointed! agree with it all. "i'm your huckleberry" is one of the sexiest lines ever uttered on screen, so i get the kilmer thing. i gotta say that this flick kinda derailed my day. i had it shipped to my work, and it was sitting there when i came in one morning. as a result of that whole instant gratification thing, i popped it into my laptop and settled in for a spell. the opening scene threw me for a loop with the snake. bad snake phobia. this was the beginning of the problem. i called in one of my guys to tell me when the snake was gone, which he did. problem was, the entire staff ended up in my office watching and, needless to say, the baking did not get done on time and there were more than a few burnt pies that day! all for a good cause. it was universally loved. especially by me. this may have become one of my top three. he does damaged/jaded soooo well. his body language, accent, facial expressions were so dead on. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow that was great Meg, thanks for your take on the movie. It
The ending is typical Herzog I guess, so you can make what you want with it... I too thought the fishtank was taking us full circle to the beginning of the movie and maybe into some introspective mood of the character. As you beautifully put it, his soul seemed absent, but who knows if he finally tracked it down down there at the aquarium.
Last week I got my copy of BL and was very excited to watch it. It is a fascinating movie with so many things to notice and think about you could watch it many times. I have seen it twice, so far. I am not good at writing reviews so I will just give my impressions as I think of them. I loved the way the music made me feel the meaning of the scenes more, if that makes sense. I thought Eva and Nick were really natural together, and his scenes with her were the most sensual I have seen him do in a while. Jennifer Coolidge was really good, it was a great part for her, and I enjoyed all the characters really, some great acting. Except for Val Kilmer, who seemed almost like a send up of a bad cop to me and had a somewhat small role, I thought, for someone of his caliber. (Tombstone is one of my favourite movies because of him.) It is amazing how Nick changes his look to portray this character, not just the bent back and the voice, but the dissoluteness and emptiness. I have known lots of addicts in my past and I recognized the look immediately, and the horrible acts that can be committed by someone you know to be innately good. I used to think that the soul seemed absent when they were in the depths. So Terence seemed immediately familiar to me, quite an amazing portrayal from someone who is clean and sober and has been for years, I think he said somewhere in an interview. The ending left me bemused, at first I thought the aquarium where they ended up at was bringing us full circle from the murdered child's fish and poem, kind of a message that he could beat the thing, but now I'm inclined to think it was just the director giving me the finger. That last little smirk. Nicolas Cage is just amazing in this film, so disturbing and funny and surreal and sad, I can't imagine anyone else doing this role. Loved it, it was wild, and you can't take your eyes off of him, he is the master.
